Ginger's Blog

Most of us no longer see our mobile phone as just a method for making phone calls or sending texts.
For most of us, our Cell is our everything, and we can’t imagine how we ever lived without it.
From sending emails, watching movies, reading the latest news and planning our entire itinerary.

In an average week, people pick up their phone more than 1,500 times to complete various tasks, and are on average on their phone for 3 hours and 16 minutes a day (that’s all most an ENTIRE day each week!!).

Therefore, we decided to list the 5 ways you aren’t using your Keyboard properly, and how you can improve your writing, time and functionality:

Emoji/Stickers/GIFs – Have fun, save time, and carry out entire conversations by using an emoji, sticker or GIF to convey your emotions and feelings.

Stream - Why even bother to lift your finger off the keyboard. By using Stream (our swipe-like feature), simply slide your finger across the keyboard, and Ginger will guess your intended words.

Accessibility and functionality Shortcuts - Improve your experience by using our Smart Bar. Save time by quickly accessing other apps without having to close your Keyboard.

Proofreading – Stop worrying about misspelling or making grammar mistakes. Ginger keyboard identifies and covers a vast range of errors, from typos through severe misspellings to grammar mistakes and wrong usage of words. Correcting all of your mistakes with a single click.

Word Prediction - You don’t even have to tap the entire sentence, as Ginger’s adaptive word prediction creates a personal database from your frequently used words, and predicts your next one.

Happy 5th of May to all our US and Mexican readers (or as it’s called in Puebla, Mexico: “El Día de la Batalla de Puebla”).

Cinco de Mayo is more than a day when people go out to the streets and celebrate with parades, mariachi music, traditional Mexican food and festivals.
Cinco de Mayo is also known as the anniversary of the Battle of Puebla, and honors the victory of the Mexican militia over Napoleon III army in 1862.

Between the years 1821 till 1858 (since Mexico’s declaration of independence from Spain till the Mexican Civil War), Mexico’s national economy was in a struggle and accumulated heavy debts to several nations, including Spain, England and France, and they demanded their payment.

In 1861, Mexico’s president, Benito Juárez, declared that all foreign debt payments would be suspended for two years. In response, the European governments sent naval forces to Mexico to demand their payment. While Britain and Spain negotiated with Mexico and withdrew, France decided to use this opportunity to create an Empire in Mexico under Napoleon III, and invaded Mexico from Veracruz.

When the French army reached Puebla on May 5th, 1862, they encountered a small, poorly armed yet strong resistance of 4,500 militiamen, that stopped and defeated the French soldiers. The victory of Puebla was a glorious moment for the Mexican people and it helped to develop a needed sense of national unity.

It seems that people are always in a hurry, and the phrase “in a New York minute” is more relevant today than ever.

If in the past, we had long, meaningful phone calls, nowadays we don’t even have the time to write a simple text message, and prefer using LOLspeak, emoji and Stickers.

Although the common stickers have been with us since the 1880′s, their popularity grew tremendously among children, in the early 1900′s, with the invention of ‘sticker paste’.
However, as people are moving away from traditional text messaging, stickers (i.e. Digital Stickers) are no longer just for young kids.

By using stickers, people can avoid conveying complex emotions and thoughts when sending a text message, chatting on Facebook messenger, texting on WhatsApp.
As we said, a sticker is worth a thousand words, and digital stickers are ’the evolution of messaging’, as they enable people to carry out entire conversations using only stickers.

Check out Ginger’s latest version for Android here, which includes emoji, GIF, emoji art and of course STICKERS.

Some of you probably know that April 22nd is marked as ‘Earth Day’, but how many of you know the history behind this glorious day?!

April 22nd marks the day, we the people of planet Earth, take a stand, and demonstrate our support for environmental protection. It is the brainchild of former US Senator, Gaylord Nelson, and inspired by the anti-war protest movements of the late 1960s.
Nelson realized that if he could infuse the energy of the anti-war movements with the emerging consciousness of the public regarding water and air pollution, it would force environmental protection onto the national political agenda.

The first Earth day took place in 1970, and began as a “national teach-in on the environment”. Thousands of colleges and universities organized protests against the deterioration of the environment, and more than 20 million Americans went out to the streets to peacefully demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment in massive coast-to-coast rallies.

By 1990, Earth Day went global, with 200 million people in over 140 nations participating. Today, there are more than 1 billion people involved in different Earth Day activities, making it the biggest civic event in the entire world.

If you wish to do more than just change your Facebook profile picture on Earth Day, you can contact the Earth Day Network (EDN), and get involved by making a difference!

So, in case you have no idea what I wrote in the title above, here’s what it means: ”In case you missed it, thank god it’s Friday, see you later and bring your own bottle. Laugh out loud”.

Well, no, I’m not actually inviting all of you to my house. This is actually a text I received from a friend of mine last week, and it took me a couple of minutes to figure out what she was trying to say.

That’s why I wanted to tell you everything you need to know about LOLspeak.
LOLspeak is a specialized form of mobile texting and messaging communication. Their origin is of course from abbreviations, which have been used in the English language since the 15th century.

With the widespread use of textual communication through emails, texting, messaging and social media, the use of LOLspeak became increasingly popular due to the fact that most of these texting services limit the number of characters that can be used in each message/post/text/etc.

Furthermore, LOLspeak is much quicker to write; and in this fast paced world, we are always looking for new ways to save time.

Here are a few examples of the more popular uses of LOLspeak:

BRB – Be Right Back

OMG – Oh My God

YOLO - You Only Live Once

IDK – I Don’t Know

ROLF – Rolling On The Floor Laughing

AFK – Away From Keyboard

TBH – To Be Honest

But don’t forget, not all LOLspeak can be used in formal school or business writing, so you should check Abbreviations.com to make sure that you didn’t just send your boss an email using “WTF”